Targeted duck listed as endangered

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It's just two weeks until the duck shooting season but one of
the birds listed on the Fish and Game Council's hunting guide has
just made it onto DOC's endangered species list.

The rapidly declining grey duck is on just-released Department
of Conservation listings, but, perhaps oddly, between five and 25
greys can still be shot a day, depending on regional limits.

Hunters gearing up for the season opener say it's tricky even
telling them apart from the common mallard duck.

"The difference between a hen mallard and a grey is just about
impossible to tell. They are slightly darker, sometimes slightly
smaller, but there's very little difference," says Blair Masters, a
duck shooter.

The real problem for greys though is their desire to mate with
mallards.

So while hundreds of thousands of their descendants exist, pure
greys are heading for extinction within 10 years.

"There's no way that you can stop them interbreeding. So
basically we are getting one homogenous soup of grey ducks and
mallard ducks and as I say that's why we've started calling them
grallards 'cause that's what they are," says Bryce Johnson of Fish
and Game.

One report for DOC suggested setting up a protected colony on
the Chatham Islands.

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While DOC will continue monitoring grey duck numbers, it says
throwing money at protecting them would be a nonsense because there
are strong populations of them in other parts of the world and
threatened species unique to New Zealand are their priority.

So it's most likely the greys in our skies will continue to be
fair game.